Two oil projects in the works could significantly increase the amount of heavy crude oil moving on — and near — the Great Lakes, causing alarm among environmentalists because they involve the same heavy oil that was behind a $1-billion oil spill on the Kalamazoo River in 2010 that remains an ecological disaster. The company fined for that spill — Canadian oil transport giant Enbridge — is behind one of the new projects.

No, that's far enough. How's about we stop right there? This company is behind a spill that's already cost a billion dollars and isn't cleaned up yet. Let me make the uninformed suggestion that they not be allowed to do business in this country for a while. And, while we're at it, maybe some people should be going to jail behind the explosion in West, Texas, too.

The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate — which can also be used in bomb making — unaware of any danger there.

Roll that figure around in your head. That would be 1350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that should have tipped the Homeland Security people, who are now busily running around trying to figure out what websites the Tsarnaev brothers may have been frequenting. Meanwhile, because of the magic hand of the free market, an entire fcking town in Texas gets blown up because of business as usual. A Canadian corporation gets another chance to screw up the Great Lakes area even before its previous screw-up is under control. Business as usual is the problem, and it's why the homeland is so damned insecure,